What is causing global warming according to Dr. Patz?

W: Dr. Patz, great to talk to you today.
M: Great to be here, Christina.
W: You have a paper called "Climate Change and Global Health Quantifying a Growing Ethical Crisis". What’s the ethical connection to global warming?
M: Well, certainly we know that the industrialized world is causing global warming with all the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, and so the ethics is clear: The rich countries producing greenhouse gases on the one hand; and on the other hand you have countries, poor countries in the developing world that are experiencing the most impacts from climate change. This is especially true in the area of health because there are so many climate-sensitive diseases, and if climate is changing, a lot of these diseases will be changing as well.
W: What kinds of diseases are we talking about? Let’s be specific.
M: Well, anything from direct effects of hot temperatures: people dying in heat waves, ground-level ozone, air pollution, or photochemical smog, very temperature-sensitive. So heat waves, air pollution, and many infectious diseases, especially those carried by insects or water-mediated diseases; so infectious diseases are highly sensitive to climatic conditions.
W: Do we see disease patterns that have already changed because of rising temperatures?
M: That’s a great question, and according to the World Health Organization, who looked at four different disease outcomes including malnutrition, malaria, flooding, and diarrhea—just looking at those four climate-sensitive diseases—they estimate over 200,000 people are killed every year from just the warming that has occurred between 1970 and 2000. And what’s unique about our paper is that we took those numbers from the World Health Organization. Actually that time it was 160,000 deaths every year from climate change. We mapped those diseases and you see regional differences. For example, malaria and malnutrition really occur in Africa, poor parts of Asia, South America; and then we put that map of climate-sensitive diseases, up against a map of CO₂ emissions, there is a complete contrast and those most vulnerable to the health risk of climate change are the least responsible when you look at the maps together. So for example, the United States’ CO₂ emissions as far as tons of carbon emitted per person every year is six tons, the global average is one ton. Canada and Australia are similarly emitting like we are at that level. So if the U.S. is at six tons of CO₂ per person per year and Japan and Western Europe are approximately two to five tons of carbon per year that they are emitting. Compare that to developing countries, which on average, 0.6 tons of carbon per year, and there are more than 50 countries that are less than 0.2 tons of carbon that they are producing every year. So that’s a huge imbalance as far as energy consumption in burning fossil fuels. Then when you put that up against the map of climate-sensitive diseases determined by WHO, what you see is in Africa, where you have 70 to 80 percent of the world’s malaria and a large amount of malnutrition, there are very climate-sensitive health outcomes you see; Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America experiencing the greatest health outcomes and that’s where the huge ethical dilemma is. You know you may even go as far as to ask the question through our energy policies, are we exporting disease and suffering around the world?
W: Let me ask you about the figure for the CO₂ output per person in the United States. Is that figure possibly a little bit misleading?
M: That’s a great question, but it’s beyond the scope of this current paper and analysis that we’ve done.
W: What effect, if any, do you expect this paper to have? Do you expect there to be any kind of policy implementation based on this paper or is this more of an academic exercise’?
M: Well, we think that this paper has key relevance in the policy world, you know, there is a lot on economics and impact, but fairness—it’s an important issue. One warning regarding the fairness issue, that we are producing global warming and the United States is the number one guilty party thus far and other countries, poor countries, are who experience the real burden. One warning is that we are in a globalized world and so an increase in disease and disease risk is anywhere in the world when you think about air transportation and, you know, food transportation, increases in disease in any region of the world really can affect all of us and so with that aspect, I think, that it would be premature, it will be wrong to think that industrialized nations are actually immune to these problems, because they’ll come back in our globalized world and affect us as well.
W: Thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it.